Inductive charger inside the case of this iPhone 4s

The hack is not for the faint of heart. But if you’ve got a precision soldering iron and a stead hand we bet you can pull it off. It starts with disassembly to get at the cable that connects the circuit board to the dock connector. [Tanv28] solders fine enameled wire to pins 16, 23, 25, and 27. The other end of these wires are soldered to the guts from a Powermat inductive charging system. After the connections are made there’s not enough room under the back cover of the phone for this added bulk. But laminating a second plastic frame onto the assembly will correct for the 1mm difference in thickness. The clip after the break walks through the entire process.

You can see that [Tanv28] also built the charging station into a piece of furniture. We just saw a post last week that used this technique to add Powermat hardware to a shelf.

This is pretty cool, could see a market for this as a kit (supplying pre-soldered connectors with charging circuits and modded back panel) but you’d probably run afoul of the iLawyers.
I always wondered why they didn’t include this as a feature on the 4s/5, since some of the android handsets (s3) come with this built in. A fairly weak excuse was tendered; That it would be confusing for for the apple flock.
“Having to create another device you have to plug into the wall is actually, for most situations, more complicated,” – Apple senior VP Phil Schiller